Amsterdam, 11 May 1998
Bill Viola received the honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1998, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and the same from Syracuse University in 1995. He represented the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995. He was awarded the first Medienkulturpreis in Germany in 1993. An active life precedes such prizes: In 1987 Bill Viola studied ancient Native American archaeological sites and rock art in the south-western United States. In 1984 he studied animal consciousness spending time with a herd of bison in Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota, and as artist-in-residence at the San Diego Zoo. In 1983 he researched imaging technologies of the human body at Memorial Medical Center, Long Beach. Between 1984 and 1976 he travels to Fiji Islands, Ladakh, northern Honshu in Japan, the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, the winter prairie landscape of Saskatchewan in Canada, to Java, Bali, Australia, the Solomon Islands and Death Valley in the Mojave Desert, California. In 1980/81 he lives and works in Japan. In 1974/76 he works in Florence, Italy, at a video art studio, where he meets such artists as Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Terry Fox. But before that, in 1973, he had already begun a lifelong relationship with David Tudor. He had the pleasure of meeting Nam June Paik as early as 1972.
Bill Viola was born 25 January 1951 in New York. On the occasion of the exhibition 'Bill Viola', curated by David A. Ross and Peter Sellars, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam this interview happened. The topic was to be spirituality. We started talking about his mother.
Bill Viola: My mother was a pretty normal middle class housewife. We lived in Queens, New York where I was born, and then moved out to the suburbs Long Island when I was 16. She really was responsible for encouraging me with my artwork. We were very close and she was always very supportive, very positive. The story in my family about the beginning of my art career centered on this drawing I made of a boat when I was three. I still remember it. My mother was trying to draw a boat for me and not doing a good job, when I became very impatient and grabbed the pencil away from her and drew it the way I thought it should be. It was actually quite a good picture of a boat and everybody was really surprised and made a big fuss over it. She encouraged me ever since that time. I always felt that she was out there looking after me. I still do.
Louwrien Wijers: You say that you really learned about spirituality through your mother.
BV: My mother was a deeply caring person. She had a strong personality. She was physically very short actually, only five feet two. Her father was very creative and very funny, a real character. He came to America from England and eventually ran his own little grocery store in the New York area. My mother was born in England and came to America in the early 1920's when she was three, after her father had saved up enough money to bring the whole family over. The English side of the family is interesting, because there were apparently some relatives who were somewhat eccentric intellectuals and some who were psychic. We've traced the family lineage there to an abbot at the local abbey in the 11th century.
LW: In which part of England?
BV: In the north-west, near Liverpool in the shipbuilding community of Barrow-in-Furness. They were mostly working in the steel mills. Of the relatives left in England there was an aunt whom I never met but who was apparently very intelligent and somewhat psychic. My mother told me about her. She would accurately describe the interior of people's houses before actually going there, or the clothes someone would be wearing when they would be coming the next day. My mother, as I was growing up, told me that she used to have these experiences all the time, but suppressed them. It disturbed her, and it was clear that she didn't want to go that way. She was complex in that sense, but deeply caring, deeply connected to the world and deeply religious. Although she did not go to church every week, she was the kind of person that felt a strong connection to God and to the deeper side of life quite naturally. My father was more pragmatic, disciplined, scheduled... you know, completely centered in the material world. He was polite about my mother's interests, but never understood any of it.
LW: But it is there in you too?
BV: Yes, I know it is, and I knew it from when I was very little.
LW: David Ross writes in the catalogue: 'I hired Bill Viola, an artist and electronic musician.' Could you recall that period?
BV: That was in 1972. I had started working with video in late 1970, coming out of several years of playing drums in rock bands and a more recent intensive involvement with electronic music. When I first picked up a video camera I knew immediately I was going to be doing that for the rest of my life. There was no doubt in my mind. It was a deep instantaneous connection, and it opened up a whole world. This was the kind of exhilarating excitement when something touches you deep inside, like love in the deepest sense not mere infatuation, but Love with a capital 'L', the kind of love the philosophers talk about. This love is what connects us to material things. That is the real power of material objects, as opposed to materialism, which is in fact the absence of love in physical objects. So I had this love affair with video and electronic images, the same power of meeting a woman or a deep friend. It was empowering. I just started to read and learn as much as I could, absorbing it, being it. Because I was always very shy up until that point, my life changed in the sense that I felt I could now begin to really express myself with confidence. I could get up in front of people and describe what I wanted to do and know that I could do it. When I was little, my art work was always about hiding away from people. I would stay by myself in my room and draw for hours. At school I'd hide in the back row. If an adult, a relative or the teacher, discovered these drawings, which they eventually always did, they would say: Look at this beautiful work and would hold them up for all to see. I would hide under the table or run away. At the point I discovered video, it was late sixties/early seventies. Everybody was working together. There was a common purpose, a bond between friends and strangers alike. We were young and we were going to change the world. We were doing video because it was against television, the monolithic, controlling, Establishment image machine the corporate, political propaganda tool. You felt like you had just learned to see through the facade, this massive screen blocking everyone's view and dulling their brains with misinformation and complacency. It was a special time. The greatest energy that human beings have is collective energy. This is why the artistic equation is so peculiar an artist working alone waiting for these moments of private revelation, yet the outcome can only be actualized and find a life when it achieves a genuine use in the community, either individually or socially. Anyway, at that time there was a really powerful collective energy, a living force which carried us all along.
LW: Where was that?
BV: For me that was in Syracuse University. It was a time of strong social consciousness, yet in the midst of it all I still really felt that nobody really knew what this inner world that I had always felt was about. Eastern philosophy, which was coming into the spotlight all around, provided some very useful models on how to proceed, but this feeling I always had since I was little remained apart. It was like the knowledge inside wasn't the same as the knowledge outside. It didn't connect. Every time I would try and realize my ideas in this strong social context of the group, it didn't work out. So, the lesson was: if I talked about what I really felt, or worked to create something in the way I saw it needed to be done, it was always either made fun of, diluted, co-opted, or misunderstood. So after awhile, I just didn't bother anymore and kept things to myself. It is like people have one set of glasses on. I have a different set, and we see different worlds. So I had that feeling at that time too.
LW: You started to work with David Ross.
BV: We went to university together. He was two years ahead of me. We had the same professor in the art school. I had three main teachers in my life and the first one was this art professor Jack Nelson. He was amazing. He made a department to bring people together who had the need to think and act in a really free way. He called it the Experimental Studio. So he saved all of these students who were frustrated with the rigid system at the school and on the verge of dropping out. He took people from all fields. David Ross came over from journalism. Later I arrived from Advertising Design. It was like an orphan's home. You went to Nelson and finally you could do whatever you wanted to. You were free. And you met other people just like you. There we were all of us hiding out with this wild man down in the basement of one of the academic buildings, which was the only place that the school found to give him as a studio. Nelson got some video equipment at the request of the students. That's how David got started. I found video just before I met Nelson, in the fall of 1970 over to the Student Union where an ambitious new student president had plans to wire the campus with a two-way interactive cable TV system and have the students produce their own programs in a brand new color studio, one of the first of its kind anywhere. I helped to install that system and that's where I learned all the technical aspects of the medium. I was always good with precise, technical things and my background in electronic music helped a lot. Later, in 1972, when David was hired as the world's first curator of video art at the local Everson Art Museum (by another wild and innovative person, the new director Jim Harithas), he brought me on as the technical exhibitions co-ordinator. It was an incredible time I was helping leading artists realize their works, being right there at the creation of the field, meeting lots of new people, and living and breathing video day and night non-stop for several years.
LW: David Ross mentions: 'Working with David Tudor was extremely influential on Bill Viola's development.'
BV: David Tudor was one of the most special people I have ever met. I have never learned more from any other person. He was a really remarkable man. Nelson and Tudor passed away in 1996, within six months of each other. I lost them both in a short period of time it was so sad. Tudor was 73 the same age as my mother when she died. I met him in 1973, right after graduating from university. I had been studying art, but electronic music was a major part of my life. There was a notice on the bulletin board in the music school that announced a workshop to be held in a small town called Chocorua in New Hampshire, and that David Tudor would be among the teachers there. I immediately signed up. I wasn't that familiar with Tudor's own compositions, but of course knew of him from his reputation as an extraordinary avant-garde pianist and long-term collaborator with John Cage. John Cage of course, with his ideas of all sounds being equal and explorations of chance operations, changed 20th century music, but many people don't know that David Tudor, after he abruptly gave up the piano to focus on electronics and composing, was one of the purest, most innovative, and creative of all the artists working with electronic media. Tudor insisted on the use of live electronics in performance, a much more difficult and demanding form than techniques that used tape or other pre-recorded or pre-programmed material. The piece I worked on with him for over 8 years was Rainforest, a system that used audio transducers to drive sounds directly into the material substance of various found objects to send them into a state of vibration that unlocked their resonant frequencies, so that completely new sounds materialized, sounds not contained in the original sources. It was magic, and functioned visually and spatially as a complex installation/performance. People of all ages and backgrounds would walk through it exploring, with intent looks on their faces listening seriously, or laughing, or just being fascinated. Much of Tudor's work as a composer focused on the phenomena of resonance the thin line where order and chaos converge. It put him right on the edge, constantly. You have no certainty as to what will happen the next moment. No one knows. So there is a huge abyss in front of us constantly. And that edge is interesting, even life-giving. Most people want to stay back from the edge, but David wanted to be right there. That, really, was his place. And his music, his art, harnessed this spark of life, the Moment-Right-Now, which became the energy point in the work. David started to build these black boxes, these little circuits. No one who worked with him knew exactly what was inside. Soon, we all began to suspect that David didn't know exactly how they worked either. All he knew was that he would get something at that edge, where it was unstable. And all of this amazing stuff would happen. That feeling of the power of the moment was there; the instability of the moment the uncertainty of the moment. The fact that one could work with that as a basic material for making art just blew my mind. When you study art history, you are studying the after-effects of being at that moment the end, the final result, the object. You don't study the uncertainty, the turbulence, the raw energy, the loss of control, the overcoming of doubt and fear. Of course, the formal discipline of chaos mathematics that described and schematized all this came later. At the time, David Tudor was out there in a field of his own. I am just grateful and happy that he chose to take some of us along for the ride for a brief time.
LW: What influence did Nam June Paik have on you?
BV: Nam June Paik is one of the most generous and creative people I have ever met. He's the wise old master of video art, the one who showed all of us the way. I have a great deal of respect for him and a great deal of gratitude and admiration for what he has done. How normal some of the images and processes in his early videotape pieces seem to us today, 30 years later, is a measure of his accomplishment and unique vision. He is also one of the most intelligent people I have met, and his early writings and manifestos are some of the greatest texts on the medium and its culture I have read. I met him in 1972, when he had a one-person show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. David Ross had invited him and of course I was the technical person from the museum who worked with him. We installed his 'TV Garden' for the first time. It was a wonderful experience. Again he was so generous and so free. One thing I have noticed about all these remarkable people is that they all make you smile. You are with them and everybody in the room around them are suddenly smiling and laughing. With Nam June, it is his openness, his child-like lucid mind. I was still a student when I met him, and to see Paik turn and talk to the director of the museum, and then turn and talk to me in exactly the same way was extraordinary and inspiring it left a deep impression. I knew other artists who would not do that. Nam June brought a lot of young people into his work. He gave many young artists an opportunity to work, to contribute to his projects in a very free and self-fulfilling way. He talked to the Rockefeller Foundation on my behalf and arranged for me to get my first grant through them, a total of 500 dollars. Through the help of my father who worked for Pan Am airlines at the time, I went to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific to shoot material for Nam June's piece 'Guadalcanal Requiem' and to make recordings of indigenous music and dance. It was nothing for the Rockefeller Foundation, but for me at the time it meant a lot. Someone actually gave me money to make something unbelievable!
LW: Which spiritual values have had an impact on your development? To which sources did you go?
BV: It must come through direct experience. I never understood this for a long time, growing up in this information age of ours. What is extraordinary right now is the amount of information we have available to us. Without spending the physical experience of meditating for years and years, we can read a book by someone who has done that. Of course it is not the same, but at least you can get some of the flavor. And this goes for science, anthropology, ship building, the ancient Greeks, anything. Although I was always drawn to this side of life from when I was quite young, I must admit that most of my experience with spiritual disciplines at the beginning was through books and reading. This is where the main operating equation of the information age breaks down. There are some forms of knowledge, most of them traditional and having to do with self-knowledge, that simply cannot be effectively and entirely transmitted as text and recorded data. The result of this is the fact that today much of this part of human experience gets ignored or trivialized. Still, having said this, it is true that something comes through, and for me, with my earlier innate tendencies in this direction, a spark of recognition and familiarity was kindled that propelled me forward. So, in the midst of all this reading, also at university, I took a workshop in meditation. There was a lunchtime meditation group about 15 people sitting together at twelve noon for 45 minutes. To this day I'm not even sure what tradition it represented, but as rudimentary and naive as it was, it gave me an introduction to the basics with instructions like focus on your breathing and become detached from your thoughts. I recall how comfortable I was with it, how enthusiastic. It was the first time I consciously sat with my silent self. I graduated university in 1973 and within four years had traveled to Java, Bali, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Japan. Those were my first direct experiences with non-western cultures. I went to Japan in 1976 to buy my first video camera through an artist Fujiko Nakaya, now a dear friend, who had contacts at Sony and who knew David Tudor. She makes clouds and fog as her art. Her father was a famous scientist who studied the structure of snow crystals. She advised me where to go in Kyoto and Nara. There I saw the temples, gardens and shrines that I had read about in books. They were like ancient works of installation art, but much more profound than anything contemporary I had seen. They were subtle, refined and sophisticated, and the hidden depth they contained, especially when I was alone there, was palpable and haunting.Sometime after that I went to the Solomon Islands and that was very different. Tokyo was a big modern city. It felt like the future, with technology everywhere more contemporary that any place in America at the time. On the Solomon Islands, life was simpler, technology more basic, existence more connected to the earth. I went to this remote village and had an experience that was really profound. I had taken a small plane through the mountains to the isolated southern coast, and then walked for six hours through the bush to get to the village of Makaruka. The area was called the 'weather coast' where strong waves and wind battered the rugged coastline. I went there to visit a man named Moro, a visionary reformer and cult leader who was leading his people back to a more traditional lifestyle. I remember one really strong moment of personal revelation. There was a celebration. They were dancing. The village was right on the sea. I was sitting on the beach and these people were dancing and playing the pan pipes. They were going around in a circle in two's, and they did this by moving rhythmically to the music, two steps forward and one backwards. I was watching them, mesmerized, and I just started weeping. I didn't know what was going on. It was completely uncontrollable, but there was a brief moment of crystal clarity where I had a deep impression of the connectedness of art and nature. Nature is a constant powerful presence there. I was on the beach, under this huge sky, with big trees and the sea with the waves coming in, and this chain of people dancing in a circle in a constant slow rotation. Then I realized: these people didn't create this music and dancing in this place it created them. Their movements were created by all that I saw, like a condensation, and it all fit so perfectly. It could not be the other way around. Darkness is not different from light day and night are one and the same, two parts of a larger whole. I saw so clearly at that moment that everything I had studied in art school was backwards, we look at the objects as if people invent these things out of nowhere. We call them 'personal expressions' and the maker an 'individual genius.' You can get rewarded and be famous by creating these works, but the real story is completely the reverse they are not your possessions, they are your gifts. They have come to you your creativity is their expression. Before that moment, it didn't even occur to me that this was possible. When I saw that, I thought: this is the only thing that all of these people could do. There was no choice. The music must sound exactly like this. They must play these bamboo pipes and they must go around in a circle. It is the same with the shape of the trees and the movement of the waves. I was amazed and overcome with emotion. I will never forget that. It was a real lesson and, most important for me then, it was the first time I was aware that I had learned something significant without a professor, without a book. That's when I realized that knowledge is out there in nature. It does not only come to you from an authority figure or an expert. It is there already latent, waiting. You can just pull it in like an antenna, if you are tuned to the right frequency. And so tuning yourself is the real work that needs to be done.
LW: The last historical Buddha said 2500 years ago that one can know truth through analyzing or through direct perception. Does that fit your remark: 'I began to see the avant-garde as a revival of the tradition of direct experience. Direct perception is what so much of the art of the 20th century has been about.'?
BV: Well, that's a good question. I think that you can also reach that deeper place by going right through the material objects of the world instead of avoiding them. Video has helped me to do that. Painters do it too in a way. E .H. Gombrich once described painting as the contest with reality. For me, in the medium that I use, the connecting point has not been the visual image, but the existence of the image in time. Time is the key. So, the kind of stuff I'm interested in exists beneath the surface of the image. For me that comes out through time. An artist like Leonardo had a way of seeing the unseen. He was the greatest master of visual perception. He used seeing, the act of seeing, to penetrate into the inner knowledge of something, which was new in the west at the time. He did it through this incredible penetrating vision that he trained on an object. He saw it from multiple points of view in multiple times. He literally saw through things, burned right through them to their inner core this is really how the bird's wing flies, this is how water moves around an obstacle, and so on. It is hard for us to imagine how great a leap that was at the time, people were not seeing the world in the optical sense of physical reality.
LW: You have done that, slowed the time. Give the mind some rest.
BV: It allows detachment. There is more space in that longer moment. It shifts the speed of perception. It gets the eyes out of the confusion of the present moment sensory perception. It can allow you to penetrate beneath the surface. One of the ancient teachings is to be here now, to live at this moment. The experience the reality of the present moment. Buddha said one of the great things that I love lot: 'You are what you have been, and what you will be is what you do now.' It is so important to co-ordinate and link your actions to the present moment. And if you can do that successfully then every action is a correct action. Problems arise when we are acting for some other moment, for some other idea or expectation. When I say 'direct experience' I mean more than just the act of seeing something. Direct experience is the living moment, the now-moment, a state of being. It is the way into the deeper nature of things. It has only been in the 20th century that we have disconnected time and space. With things like broadcast, for the first time you can experience the now moment in New York and Amsterdam simultaneously. We never had the idea of simultaneous global time before it never existed. When new times began appearing, we even had to create a new word for the original one 'real time.' It inferred the existence of other, 'false' times. The people I met in the Solomon Islands have no need for the word 'real time' all of their time is real. In terms of art, as the painters began breaking with vanishing point perspective and the representation of literal optical reality, they began to move out of the controlled confines of the studio and into the expansive outside world of city streets and nature. The first thing they were confronted with while attempting to paint what was before them was one of the founding principles of Buddhism, all life is change. They met the living dynamic nature of the moment head on and began to paint time itself. Now, in my art history class in art school this was always presented to me as a big break with tradition and something totally new. It took me a long time to find out that in fact it was quite old and connected to something that goes back right into the heart of Eastern spiritual disciplines, the tradition of direct experience.
LW: When did it come into art?
BV: In terms of recent western art history, in France in the 19th century with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists who captured the moment of light. That's when the painting starts getting really wild and the images became less representational and more about action. Then that leads right up to action painting in the 20th century. And Zen is exactly that. The Zen Buddhists were doing the same thing in the 17th century. The ink painter's dictum: One moment, one chance! The technique of ink painting on paper made it impossible to revise or erase any brushstroke. Every action showed. Every thought was represented. And when you've eliminated the past and future, then it becomes all about what you have in yourself, your state of consciousness when you make that mark. This is the real subject of Zen painting. In Japan, all of this was contextualized within a formal system, highly evolved and with a long history, aimed at perfecting the individual. Whereas for Jackson Pollock it wasn't, and in the work of the 19th and 20th century artists you can see the comparative lack of focus and widely divergent intentions and results, but in a very general way the direction was the same. That was the point that I'm interested in.
LW: In your videotape from 1986 'I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like', are you referring to Ganesha, as Marilyn Zeitlin suggests, when that elegant elephant comes up and takes the cup from the table?
BV: No, not at all. That idea came from the famous Central Asian fable of the blind men and the elephant. In Rumi's Mathnawi it appears as 'The Elephant in the Dark Room.' I love that story. The idea is that nobody really knows the true reality, because our limitations only permit us to see a part of it at a time. In that particular scene in the video, I wanted to put an elephant in that dark room where the man is working in the middle of the night. It was also for me a reference to when you are up alone at night, working on something difficult and absorbing, and you feel that you are not alone. I always sense this massive presence in the room. I become aware that there is another outside consciousness there. Then, I begin to feel that the thing that I am working on is also is a kind of presence. You have a need to be touching something that you don't quite understand. The reason to make work is precisely because of this unclarity, that it is concealed from view. You are reaching for this idea and you have to get it out. This is the artist's work. My own thoughts about that presence is that it is the block you have to get out of the way the obstacle that stands between you and the idea. It is not an inert mass. It is a living thing. So, the culmination of that long sequence of the scholar in his study comes after we have been looking at him sitting at his desk against the wall from inside the room. Then at the very end, there is a reverse angle view, shot from the opposite side, looking back out into the room, which is completely dark. The lights come up and you see the elephant, the point of consciousness that has been observing the scene all along.
LW: Is there really an elephant?
BV: Oh yes, her name is Nita and she lives in the San Diego Zoo. I was artist-in-residence there in 1994. They had these trained elephants and they let me work with one. It was an amazing experience.
LW: Please elaborate on your remark: 'The question of quality in art-making in traditional religious contexts usually has more to do with the devotion and practice of the artist than the visual appearance of the end result.'
BV: Well, there are other qualities in objects that don't have to do with the immediate sensory perception of those objects. You can have an image of the Madonna and Child next to another image of the Madonna and Child, and one of those images will be a powerful, sacred icon and the other one will just be some ordinary painting that doesn't have any power. Now, where does that power come from? It doesn't come from the materials. It doesn't come from the techniques. It doesn't come from 'self expression.' If you are making something for God, then it is really, really serious. You have to make it better than the best. You can't make it solely for yourself. So, the idea of who you make your work for is key. Do you make it for the public? For the art world of critics and curators? For the client? A number of contemporary artists do make things for themselves, or for their dealer, or for show and the market exerts a tremendous influence. The traditional idea that artists make their work for God is an acknowledgement in contemporary terms that artists should make their work as a gift from and to something outside of and larger than themselves. The present-day role of the artist in society actually started here in Holland when, in the 17th century after the Eighty Years War, artists were not being sponsored by the Catholic church or the king anymore. It was one of the first times in European art history that artists, after losing royal sponsorship and the connection to the church, began to create work for the new power structure, the merchant class. They were forced to offer their works in the marketplace, along with other goods and commodities. Now they were out in the real world, having to make a living by selling their art. Artists began producing for a new market, secular images (although often with allegorical meanings), genre paintings of material objects, beautiful still lifes of tables filled with food that looked real enough to eat, images of the boards of directors and CEO's of the new corporations. Of course, not everything sold. The 'starving artist' was born. Artists drove 'taxis', ran small 'motels', worked odd jobs and made their art on the side during their days off. Vermeer ran an inn and painted upstairs on weekends. So the Dutch it seems were really ahead of their time! But in the end, with someone like Vermeer, there is a hidden something in the work that distinguishes it from the hundreds of other painters of the time dealing with similar if not identical subjects. It is undeniable. So again, the question is, what gives the work its power? I'm not sure, but if Vermeer lived earlier and was a Catholic, I'd like to think that his Madonna would be the one with that same power.
LW: You said, 'The place of the individual in society is one of the key issues right now. From the privacy of my room I can go on the Internet and communicate mind to mind. You are on your own to navigate through the chaotic flux of things.' Please comment.
BV: The guide posts that we have had in our past, the signs that show the individual how to move through life, are in disarray garbled or faded or washed away. Empowered by technology, the individual is now free to do anything and be anything, but in reality one is free the way a boat is just let loose on a rough sea. That's not really free, because it is not going where it needs to go. So it is actually a very confusing time. The dominant institutions are not going to help you anymore. In fact, their path will most likely be detrimental they'll just take your time and money and leave you empty handed and empty headed. I think many people unconsciously sense this dilemma and feel its unsettling, destabilizing effects in their daily lives. Simply creating new institutions based on the old models will not work. The key point is that the guideposts for the way to go must now come from within the individual. And finding the inner way on your own terms has always been extremely difficult, that's why institutions and spiritual practices arose in the first place. Going it alone puts a lot of pressure on the person, particularly young people. I think that this is one of the reasons why Eastern religions in particular have had a renewed significance in the 20th century. Their whole purpose is to give the individual the means to have a direct connection to God, to experience truth, enlightenment, knowledge, or whatever you want to call it, firsthand. Individual empowerment giving a person the tools to do that on their own terms is a very attractive idea for a lot of contemporary people living in industrialized societies.
LW: How do you see the change politically?
BV: The change politically is moving from a vertical power structure to a horizontal power structure, where individuals are empowered to make their own reality. You move through the Internet in the way that you want to. The idea of mass audience is dead. The Internet is the most significant development in the politics of information control since the printing press. The fact that you or I could put up a website tomorrow and be on equal terms in cyberspace with Coca Cola, Toyota, The New York Times, the United States Government, Bank of America, or Harvard University is unprecedented. Let's see how long it will last in its present form, particularly in the market-driven, profit-based landscape of America and the era of the multinationals. The information horizon is infinite but no longer undifferentiated. It is changing as we speak. Infinite choice is a myth, especially if the available choices have been filtered. I hate to be pessimistic, but someone will figure out a way to put up fences, bring in the bulldozers and control it they always do. Information on the Internet is plentiful but not verifiable, which is both exciting and problematic. Look at what happened with the 'Men In Black' movie advertising campaign last year. A young, Web-head marketing executive was hired to put up a website for 'Men In Black' as soon as the project was approved by the studios, before a single frame of film was shot and a full two years before the movie was released. Pre-building an audience is not a new marketing idea, but this worked far beyond their expectations. The website gathered a huge following with its underground, cult-like veneer. It had an independent existence no mention of the planned movie was ever made. By the time the movie came out many young people thought that they were finally making a movie of this underground Web comic strip story, 'Men In Black.' In its present form, I see the Internet as individual empowerment, which is positive, but I also see it as individual isolation and dependency. And isolation and dependency are the prerequisites to control political, economic or otherwise.
LW: You have said: 'Both the conscious and unconscious worlds are available to engage with in the form of artistic practice.'
BV: Yes, each of us has a unique consciousness to perfect something, to develop what we are doing. We all exercise conscious control. But at the same time, if you overdevelop your conscious thought, then you get very self-conscious art, dead art really, because it doesn't have any risk or honesty, or any kind of unknown aspects to it. It is all schemed and planned and strategized, which is what our rational minds do so well. Critical discourse and discussion surrounding works of art today come from this place. But you have to develop both sides, the conscious and the unconscious to open yourself up, for the artist and for the viewer too. You have to be aware of the different surfaces, above the water and below the water. And know that for the most part, the conscious mind is the tricky one to watch out for.
LW: Do you feel that art has a function there in today's society?
BV: Yes, to connect those two worlds is exactly its function. Coomaraswamy reminded us that all artistic operations were originally rites, and the purpose of the rite is to sacrifice the old and to bring into being a new and more perfect human being. Art has always had the power to heal, and it is this same healing function that it has today.
LW: You have stated: 'An exhalation which was not followed by an inhalation was one of the most profound things I have experienced.'
BV: Now we are talking about my mother's death. I never saw the end of a human life before. That was in 1991. When I got over some of the overwhelming personal grief and began to think about what happened, I started seeing it more clearly. I realized that it was probably the most profound thing I had ever witnessed in my life a truly miraculous event. Normally we associate those feelings with the birth of a child. In most people's minds, birth is a positive thing and death is negative, but in fact both are the same miraculous and unknowable. They are both about the transition from one state to another. Death really was the deepest teaching I ever had and it brought so many things into perspective and into a form of personal knowledge. Experiencing my mother's passing was when the philosophical ideas I had been living with from my studies became absolutely, stone-hard REAL. The philosophical idea or religious expression is simply the later descriptive stage of the real thing. The source is as real as the wind, a flood, the full moon, or a storm. It must be experienced to be understood, and so the emphasis that Eastern spiritual practices place on physical body experience. The death of the mother is a personal thing, a tragic thing. It's all the emotions in your whole life put together. And then you think about it later and you realize where all these things come from. When my mother died, the thing that really shocked me was the absolute stillness. I looked and realized: this person will never move again. It was so final extraordinary, like a frozen moment of eternity. That's what eternity is really the end of time. Seeing the end of movement in real life is so powerful and profound. Life is connected with this movement, this force which is called soul, which in the original Latin is 'anima,' as in 'animation' or 'animate object.' The word references movement and breath. These terms, these realizations, come directly out of moments like these. They are not abstract concepts. They are based on an observation of something that was there, as logical as calling water 'wet' or fire 'hot.' The whole idea of breath as the life force is part of an intricate religious-philosophical system which you see again and again in various and diverse ancient cultures. But then you have an actual experience and you see Yes, when the last breath goes there's no more life force. This is so clear it isn't poetic interpretation. All these things come directly from the world. They are not in books. They are not mental ideas. They are nature herself.
LW: Last question: how important has your wife Kira Perov been to your oeuvre?
BV: Kira is so much important to what I do, she is really the other side of my mind. I always carry her with me. She is very selfless and is always caring about others, which I admire so much. I don't know if I could do the same, handling all these things of the world, family, work, that she does so well. I love and respect her immensely. She is amazing with our kids. She organizes and manages all of my projects. And she has to live with me and my creative moods, which is even more demanding. She understands the creative process so well. She knows when I am totally confused about something, but she won't push it. She'll wait for me to get through something, and then come in just at the right time with an observation or suggestion of which way to go. I have this intuitive way to know when it's right for me to show her something after I've been working on it for a while. I reach a point and then say okay, I have to show this to Kira. She'll give me response, say a few key things and spark something that I didn't think about, in a beautiful way. It's hard balancing everything, because part of what I do is business, my livelihood, and it's confusing, because it is something you do because you love to do it, it's not about money or paying the bills. But this is part of the world and it always has been for artists. Then, we also have kids, and that is about love too. So, how do you manage the time? How do you give love to everything equally? It's very complicated. This last year is probably the hardest year we have ever spent together. We spent a whole year working out the Whitney show, non-stop. My father moved in to live with us and then became ill. It was really tough. Kira was the one who really put that whole catalogue together, co-ordinating everything. She is also a photographer, and those are mostly her photographs in the book. All that pressure, all that energy she was so much part of the process of making the show. I mean, David Ross, Peter Sellars and I, we could think on this certain level, but Kira was someone who would always bring it down to earth and channel it towards actually getting done. It was very impressive. We all had to work hard. We are still getting over it. My father is finally getting better. I don't know how we ever did it, but then I never know how I do something. All I know is that it happens.
Louwrien Wijers
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